Since the 1980s, people have started to realize building automation with the help of information technology, for example, broadcast & sound system, IC card management system, hotel room management system, energy monitoring & management system for specific service functions, as well as air-conditioning control system, security system, firefighting system, chiller plant control system, electrical safety system, etc. However, the problem lies in that, the management control system in the prior art is often not so “intelligent”, and more than half of building automation systems can only remotely monitor the building environment and the operating parameter of the system equipment in the central control room, and manually stop/start or regulate the operating state of the electromechanical equipment through human-machine interface. Such system is substantially dependent heavily on manual operation of the operator, without achieving automation and intelligence. Only a very few buildings can realize automatic control and management at the building level, including optimal control in sub-systems and integrated control between the sub-systems.
The root cause of this situation lies in the centralized architecture of the automatic control system. As shown in FIG. 1, the automatic control system in the prior art adopts a centralized organizational structure, in which all terminal measuring and controlling points (sensor, actuator, field controller) are connected by a bus communication network. The terminal information measuring and controlling points of the sub-systems (lighting system, air conditioning system, firefighting system, security system) are largely distributed in the same building sub-space, but they are integrated vertically according to different sub-systems. The centralized automatic control system has the following main disadvantages:
1. It is necessary to conduct global communication naming and define physical properties for the terminal measuring and controlling points, and specify correlations between them. When there are a larger number of measuring and controlling points, such field configuration becomes extremely heavy and difficult; this work can be started only after building construction is completed and electromechanical equipments are in place, the construction/commissioning period available is very short, and thus the work is done hurriedly; in later changes of building layout or function partition, the automatic control system is difficult to change flexibly when the building layout or the function partition changes in later time.
2. It is difficult to achieve real information sharing among the sub-systems. A new system will be established on the upper layers of some existing systems in order to achieve cross-system information sharing, and this needs to re-configure and re-define the whole system, which leads to extremely high difficulty and cost and is not adapted to demands on intellectualization, informationzation and front-end of the building control;
3. The automatic control platform is closed and has a poor generality. The control software is often separately designed for individual building, and thus in the process of system transformation and expansion, the new control strategy is difficult to be realized flexibly and simply on the existing automatic control platform.
4. It is difficult to conduct cross-system integration. The existing automatic control system and platform have poor generality and unfriendly software/hardware environment. The developer is required to have higher professional IT knowledge, while various control strategies and control logics (e.g., control strategy of the HVAC system, control strategy of firefighting system, control strategy of security system) operating in the automatic control system are always formulated by the engineers in various fields (HVAC engineer, fire safety engineer, etc.). Therefore, the engineers in various fields are very difficult to convert the formulated control strategies and control logics into the control software of the automatic control system, so that the functions that the sub-systems should realize are very difficult to integrate into the existing automatic control system and automatic control platform.